Does Avatar have underlying plausibility?

It means it has a valid point to make because it’s insistent!

I did like the Money Pit. Even though the entire house building was done in a virtual world.

I watched Virtuosity in the theatre, got beaten up by Russell Crowe on my way home.

Why would you want it any other way?

I mean, if I wanted a movie to be plausible that badly I suppose I could do it to any movie. There, I’m happy now, Star Wars is possible.

Is this how organised theism started. :confused:

There’s two things wrong with this statement. One is your contention that your interpretation is compatible with the events portrayed in the movie. The other is that people are disagree with you because they “don’t understand” VR. In point of fact, the only person in this thread who doesn’t understand the concept of virtual reality is yourself.

Consider this. The central conflict to the story is the desire of a corporation to control mineral resources that exist under the Navi tribal lands. If the Navi and their forest existed purely in a virtual simulation, there would be no reason to force them off their land. The people in control of the simulation could simply produce as much of the item as they wanted. Properly speaking, value has no meaning within a virtual society, because, due to its virtual nature, there can be no such thing as true scarcity. Anything that’s needed, can be instantly and perfectly reproduced, infinitely, at the touch of a button.

This is the major conceptual hole in your theory. There are, of course, the massive textual holes in your theory, the most glaring being the absolute and total lack of anything in the entire movie that suggests any portion of the film’s events are taking place in VR. To accept your theory, one would not only have to invent a significant amount of backstory, but you have to actively ignore large portions of the film that explicitly state that Sully is inhabiting a physical body on an actual planet. There is, and I say this with absolutely no hyperbole whatsoever, as much support for the events of Avatar happening in a virtual reality, as there is for The Sound of Music.

Well, how do you solve a problem like the N’avi?

Destroy them all and tell Earthling they never really existed. Nuking them from orbit would do the trick.

Just for singing in the abbey? Harsh.

Do - a deer, a six-legged deer…

*'ray … our side has bigger guns!

Me … a stud … who’s not Na’vi,

Far … around a distant sun!

So … I wish I could be blue!

La … a note that rhymes with na …

… tiri … a babe who’s noble too!

Which brings us so much dough … dough … dough … dough … .*

“And the avatars in our story are living breathing bodies in a real word. They are not, as the word has been appropriated by the cybersphere, are not synthetic alter egos in cyberspace. Just to be clear, this is not a Matrix type story”

-James Cameron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XrQgA2PWvg (3:20)